I really do love to be beside the seaside!
(And Barbara should know...she’s visited same resort for 84 years)
BARBARA Johnson is heading off on holiday this summer – to the same place she’s been visiting for 84 years.
The great-grandmother has been checking into Lytham St Annes every year since 1933, when she was just a baby.
And her love affair with the Lancashire seaside resort – best known as home to George Formby and for its golf – never faltered, not even during the Second World War.
“We absolutely love going to Lytham. It would be awful to miss a trip,” said Barbara, a retired shorthand typist from 50 miles away in Macclesfield, Cheshire.
“I know it’s a fairly long run, going for 84 years in a row. But for me it’s just like travelling to a second home.
“It’s very ‘olde worlde’ and not rowdy at all. I know it so well and my parents even retired there. We make sure we never miss our trip.”
Barbara was first taken to the area when she was just six months old. She has fond memories of swimming in the lido and walking along the promenade with her mother.
The family always stayed in the same hostel, where guests would buy their own food and have it cooked for them by the landlady, who they knew as Aunty Bertha.
“My dad was always able to get time off work, and we would spend at least two weeks of summer there,” she said.
“I remember going with the pram to the station, getting the steam train to Manchester, and then changing to get the train to Lytham.
“There isn’t much of a beach there, so we always used to have sand and a paddling pool to play with. We went swimming every day. I can remember my mother walking along the promenade in her dresses and hats. I always thought she looked glamorous.”
Barbara and her family continued to holiday in Lytham during the war, which she described as a wonderful escape from the horrible news she would hear at home.
Shortly after she met her future husband Dennis, now 87, he started joining the family on their trip, accompanying Barbara to visit her parents when they retired to Lytham in 1968.
And they continued going there after daughters Judith and Caroline were born in the 1950s. Barbara said:
“The girls used to love going as much as I did. Dennis would always play bowls with my father, and we used to get in trouble when Caroline would go running and rolling across the green. It used to annoy the old people so much, and it makes me laugh even now.
“We would often stay with my parents until they died, and now we stay at the Chadwick Hotel. If my daughters didn’t live close to me, I would have retired to Lytham with Dennis a long time ago. “
Dennis, who worked in the coal industry, was put off travelling abroad after completing his national service in Egypt.
He and Barbara have holidayed on the continent only once, visiting France and Switzerland in the 1980s.
“Everyone said how lovely it would be, but I just thought it was too hot,” Barbara said.
“I was extremely glad when we got back.
“The British weather has never bothered me, and there’s nowhere better than Lytham in the sunshine.”